Should I use the <p /> tag in markup?

html layout tags markup
maxp picture maxp · Aug 11, 2009 · Viewed 22.9k times · Source

I have always used either <br /> or a <div/> tag when something more advanced is necessary.

Is use of the <p/> tag still encouraged?

Answer

Christian Hayter picture Christian Hayter · Aug 11, 2009

Modern HTML semantics are:

  • Use <p></p> to contain a paragraph of text in a document.
  • Use <br /> to indicate a line break inside a paragraph (i.e. a new line without the paragraph block margins or padding).
  • Use <div></div> to contain a piece of application UI that happens to have block layout.

Don't use <div /> or <p /> on its own, those tags are meant to contain content. They appear to work as paragraph breaks only because when the browser sees them, it "helpfully" closes the current block tag before opening the empty one.

Related questions

Get the size of the screen, current web page and browser window

How can I get windowWidth, windowHeight, pageWidth, pageHeight, screenWidth, screenHeight, pageX, pageY, screenX, screenY which will work in all major browsers?

Read More
CSS - Expand float child DIV height to parent's height

I have the page structure as: <div class="parent"> <div class="child-left floatLeft"> </div> <div class="child-right floatLeft"> </div> </div> Now, the child-left DIV will have more content, …

Read More
What is a clearfix?

Recently I was looking through some website's code, and saw that every <div> had a class clearfix. After a quick Google search, I learned that it is for IE6 sometimes, but what actually is a clearfix? Could you …

Read More